Twitter got real this super bowl. I’m not talking, “Whoa tons of Super Bowl ads used hashtags!” but a revolution of real time marketing.

And until Sunday’s Super Bowl game and blackout, “real time” was pretty much just another overhyped fad to most, an empty buzzword. But this game was a turning point, a pivotal application of real real time by some of the biggest brands in the world. This year there was way less of the “let’s blow this thing out” or “let’s create the next Budweiser frogs” type of agency BS. For the first time, brands reacted quickly — in a relevant and authentic way.

Jim Cooper, the Executive Editor of Adweek, told me yesterday, “The most important marketing associated with Super Bowl XLVII won’t be any of the $3.8 million :30 spots, but rather Oreo’s Twitter play during the game’s unfortunate blackout.”

360i, the agency behind Oreo, shed some light on the viral Tweet. Sarah Hofstetter, President of 360i, commented to me about the event:

Oreo has demonstrated its ability to be a first mover in the digital space – this post shared in real-time was a great example of that. While we may not have anticipated the power outage, we were prepared with a team of social media experts in our ‘command center’ ready to act in a moment’s notice.

Cooper added, “The remarkably nimble real time response, which drew massive social recognition and buzz, cost brands very little, but very likely altered the gyroscope on real time marketing forever.”’

Our marketing gyroscope — or the way we measure and orient ourselves around real time marketing — isn’t totally clear yet. Why? Because many of the concrete success metrics around real time marketing and real time crowd involvement have yet to be discovered.

Gary Vaynerchuck, CEO and founder of Vayner Media, put it like this: “The old, stodgy way of measuring impressions is done. It’s about being nimble and being real. And learning how to the be the brand that breaks the breaking news.”

Darren Rovell of ESPN and ABC’s Sports Business agreed, telling me, “We are at the very beginning of this idea of live, spontaneous audience response, and it’s clear that mining this data will lead to real value one day.” But the potential for value is huge — in providing a new way to conduct market research from social reactions, in creating more useful ad targeting metrics, and in facilitating new R&D for better ideas.

The importance of real time Web experiences is going to grow. Vaynerchuck is calling this our “watershed moment.” CNN and cable news had one of these watershed moments about 21 years ago during the Gulf War. And we marketing and tech people should learn from it. I was too young to remember but one writer from the Arizona Republic said: “[It was the first time that] television had the ability to transmit stories same day — same moment — straight into America’s living rooms, and it was a boom time for broadcast journalism.”

The idea of “same day, same moment” information through television was cool, but that was over two decades ago. Darren Rovell, who is behind one of the most respected sports business Twitter accounts (@darrenrovell) says it best: “We now have the ability to poll or hear from large amounts of people as something is happening.” Crowd reaction to our content is immediate.

The brands and publishers who work closely with their social media teams will be the ones who win. They will win with the best content, the best conversation, and by getting the truest, real time reaction from the crowd.

It took just four minutes for a brand to take out an ad against “power outage” according to the @TwitterAds account. Let’s make it seconds next year. Or better yet, as my team says, let’s make it milliseconds.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]